3d Hammer

Hammer Time!

So winter break is over and were back on track with class unfortunately. At least were back to animation! So our first project we were assigned was to create a hammer and nail within a 3d animation program called Maya. 

Modeling

The first and most time consuming part of this project was the modeling. This process was the creation of the 3d model I would use to represent a hammer and nail. This can be a very fun part of the project but we all encountered the same problem will modeling. Tumble. Tumble is a mode you can be in within Maya that forms everything even though its not selected. This was obviously a big issue considering that we needed to select certain parts of the model to do certain things like create the claw of the hammer. All of us were almost screaming at our computers when suddenly Mr. Netterville comes and fixes literally all of our computers with one button. B. Moral of the story: Tumble is turned on with B. Anyways We had 4 things we had to create in Maya: The Handle, Hammer Head, the Claw and the nail. The hardest of the 4 had to be the claw but that was only because of the tumble tool. You just had to use the scale tool and rotate the model downwards to create the claw. To create the handle you first start with a high rectangular block and add divisions and start forming the divisions into the handle. The head was pretty easy with just a couple of extrudes and forming here and there. The nail was the easiest because you just make a thin cylinder and make a point on the end.

Shading and Lighting

I put these together because they literally coincide with one another. To have shadows you have to have light so these two have to be treated the same way. So for this project we used a technique called     3 point lighting. This contains a Fill light, Key Light, and Back Light. The Back and Fill light are mostly used as support to emphasize the key light and its effect. All of this is used to manipulate shadows to make the object seem to pop. Im generally new to this which you can see in my pic but I'm learning.